"I have a sister," said he, after a minute's pause. And he did not laugh. "She and I have been—tremendous chums all our lives. There isn't a thing she has done, or a thought she has had, that I don't know, and the other way round, of course."
"Twins?" I asked.
"She is twenty-one."
"Oh, four or five years older than you."
The boy evidently did not take this as a question. "She is unfortunately an heiress," he said. "Money has brought misery upon her, and through her, on me; for if she suffers, I suffer too. She used to believe in everybody. She thought men were even more sincere and upright than women, because their outlook on life was larger, and so it was easy for her to be deceived. When she came out she wasn't quite eighteen (you see we have no father or mother, only a lazy old guardian-uncle), and she thought everyone was wonderfully kind to her, so she was very happy. I suppose there never was a happier girl—for a while. But by-and-bye she began to find out things. She discovered that the men who seemed the nicest only cared for her money, not for her at all."
"How could she be sure of that?"
"It was proved, over and over again, in lots of ways."
"But if she is a pretty and charming girl––"
"I think she is only odd—like me. People don't understand her, especially men. They find her strange, and men don't like girls to be strange."
"Don't they? I thought they did."